One note to bleed the working poor…oh my…i think i don’t wanna hear their songs..great use of metaphor here…i would wish there was a bit more humanity in their songs…wonderfully penned with a great flow as well

I had to look up “Sylphs” and then I found Popes satire on them. And then I imagined vain women ascending to the skies wreaking financial horror on us all. But it is men, mostly — men chasing vain women or just men being men.

Fascinating poem — songs of the Sylphs bending rainbows and causing havoc — beauty and violent storms both. Nature and the gods care not for men and women — nor often we for ourselves.

Pope’s satire is interesting, primarily because of what it says about Pope. Even in his own time his attitude towards women was considered somewhat “out there”. Elementals such as Sylphs (as constructed by Paracelsus in the 15th Century) are of a more complex and metaphoric/metaphysical nature than Pope, with his somewhat constrained world view, could possibly acknowledge. Many early “enlightenment” figures certainly seemed to struggle with non-literal understanding (something they inherited from Pauline Christianity, and passed on to modern Science). Sylphs aren’t female – nor are they the fairies the Victorians later turned them into (in countless awful paintings). Paracelsus, in his weird way, seemed to be trying to articulate the sense of being simultaneously connected and distant from the world – he placed Elementals at that pivot point. It is a view rich in possibilities (as Pope inadvertently, and despite himself, found).